Location Digest: A placeness service to discover community experience using social media

Abstract

Sociality plays a vital role in our daily lives. Be it a hyper-local search for finding a restaurant to eat or a global search for your next travel destination; as humans, we tend to make our choices considering the social atmosphere offered by the place. Placeness, in this context, refers to the social and cultural semantics of the space under consideration and represents the distinctiveness of a place. In this paper, we aim to discover placeness as the exemplary community experience associated with a given location. We do this by, first adopting a flexible methodology for mining placeness, and then proposing a novel unsupervised mechanism for discovering placeness. Furthermore, we implement placeness as an IoT service for Smart City dwellers, calling it as Location Digest, by using GS1 standards-based Open Language for the Internet of Things (Oliot) platform. We report a sufficiently high F1-score of 0.81 for our unsupervised placeness discovery mechanism and present Location Digest as an essential service for assisting tourists in a Smart City.